'Poems are like sentences that have taken their clothes off.' Marlene Dumas' poetic and sensual refrain accompanies her figurative watercolours on view in Possibilities for a Non-Alienated Life, the fourth edition of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) in the southern state of Kerala, India (12 December 2018–29 March 2019).Dumas' new series...

The paintings of Ellen Altfest are ethereal in their detail. Fields of minutiae come together as pulsating images; small brushstrokes of oil paint accumulate over a series of months to single out seemingly innocuous subjects, such as a hand resting atop patterned fabric (The Hand, 2011) or a deep green cactus reaching upwards from beneath a bed of...

On the rooftop of the former Rio Hotel complex in Colombo, it was hard to ignore the high-rise buildings, still under construction, blocking all but a sliver of what used to be an open view over Slave Island, once an island on Beira Lake that housed slaves in the 19th century, and now a downtown suburb. The hotel was set alight during the...

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The American artist Jenny Holzer, known for challenging texts imposed on urban settings, has been chosen as the next contemporary artist to tackle one of the most privileged spaces in the UK, the baroque splendour of Blenheim Palace.

Tell us about some of the programming you have developed for this edition.Within New Proposals - one of the five sections of the fair - and together with curator Humberto Moro, we are creating a new initiative called SAMPLE that will provide exhibition space for artists from the galleries participating in that section. Luis Silva and Joao Mourao...

The Grand Palais and the Petit Palais, both built for the 1900 Universal Exposition in Paris, have long been separated by a wide and busy street that links this city’s right and left banks. This week, during the International Contemporary Art Fair, the Avenue Winston Churchill will be shut to ordinary traffic, and these two monuments to the...

It’s a sunny autumn day in the small Japanese city of Okayama, and two British men born in the 1960s are conversing about cameras. Liam Gillick and I both own the retro-looking Fujifilm X-Pro1, which we’ve chosen for its impressive price-to-performance ratio. “I’ve used it a lot in my work,” a ruddy-faced, relaxed, and...

Oniric atmospheres and lyrical rural landscapes, surreal imagery reflecting lost memories and superstitions, karmic events and a sensual, languid pace mark the oeuvre of renowned and acclaimed Thai artist and filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul.Born in 1970 in Khon Kaen in northeastern Thailand, Weerasethakul now lives and works in Chiang Mai....

Have you ever wanted to walk through a large shirt? Whether or not you’ve entertained the notion, it is now a real possibility at Storm King Art Center. The upstate New York sculpture park is currently home to a super-sized sculpture of a collared men’s shirt and tie, conceived by Dennis Oppenheim. The work serves as an archway to a...

Who are the people under 40 making waves in the art world? That was the question we asked ourselves in 2014, when we launched the first Apollo 40 Under 40. That year’s list, which focused on Europe, and the subsequent 40 Under 40 USA, weren’t meant as power lists but as surveys of talent: of young people who have firmly established...

Opened alongside Para Site’s 4th annual International Conference (6/21–23), That Has Been, and May Be Again is an exhibition honoring the multitude of voices that have arisen throughout 1980s and ’90s China, that speak to the search for a cultural and political identity during the country’s modernization. The diverse...

Nature has always been a source of inspiration for artists, and landscape remains a favored subject for many. In the late 1960s, a group of artists, including Robert Smithson, Walter De Maria, Michael Heizer, and Dennis Oppenheim, among others, came up with the revolutionary idea to consider land itself as a medium, inherently laden as it is with...

From his Minimalist earthworks created in remote places in the 1960s to Pop-Surrealist public sculptures for urban settings in the 1990s and 2000s, Dennis Oppenheim was dedicated to the proposition that art should be open to the world rather than cloistered in galleries and museums. So it is appropriate that he should be this year’s featured...

You might not have guessed from Samson Young’s eclectic work that he is a classically trained music composer; or maybe you would, given how intellectually challenging some of his pieces are. But that is the exhilarating aspect of navigating through his works. Just when you feel your mind is being bogged down by all that Hong Kong history,...

The notion of the “Hong Kong identity” is certainly nothing new. Constructing and defining the “Hong Kong identity” has been a prevalent topic since the years preceding the handover of the city-state to China in 1997. Leaders of Hong Kong branded the Fragrant Harbor as “Asia’s World City” in 2001; now 15...

A new show at Hong Kong’s Para Site exhibition space is a reminder that mainstream narratives have a tendency to obscure what artists do during periods of great political change.Those narratives affect how we see art history. After the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown, it was assumed that the restrictive environment forced artists to...

The 2016 edition of Parcours will be sited in the historical center of Basel around the city’s iconic cathedral, inhabiting locations such as the cathedral’s chapel, Münsterplatz, the Museum of Culture, an underground tunnel below the Grand Hotel Les Trois Rois and historic locations along the river Rhine. Curated for the first time by...

In February 2016, coinciding with the Chinese Lunar New Year celebrations, Manchester’s Centre For Chinese Contemporary Art (CFCCA) launched a six-month programme of exhibitions for its 30th anniversary. The anniversary programme invites artists from CFCCA’s history, who have become internationally acclaimed, to return to Manchester to...

Since the 1980s, the work of Alfredo Jaar has dealt with the forms and ethics through which art takes responsibility for complex phenomena in society. He has created a language that breaks through the mechanisms that dehumanize individuals and communities in moments of turmoil from our recent history. In 2016, two solo exhibitions of his...

Running from 19 March to 29 May 2016 at Para Site, Afterwork is a group exhibition that explores a wide scope of issues related to “race” – as constructed through ingrained socio-cultural, political, economic, legal and historical forces and representations – as well as its relation to class, labour and migration within and...

When the sprawling aisles of Art Basel Hong Kong become too much, there’s plenty more art to see around the city. Here’s our guide to the must-see exhibitions. From the collection of former Swiss ambassador Uli Sigg to Conrad Shawcross’s dancing robot, find out what’s going on beyond the fair.

At a time when the traversing of borders, by people, information and culture, is at the forefront of international consciousness and concern, Para Site, an independent art center in Hong Kong, is presenting an exhibition of four postwar artists whose outputs have shown just how fluid such boundaries can be. Held in Hong Kong’s North Point...

The Prudential Eye Awards 2016 was held at the Sands Theatre at Marina Bay Sands in Singapore on 19 January 2016. Featuring 15 shortlisted artists, 39 works and an eminent panel of Judges, the event celebrates Asia’s most exciting up-and-coming talent. The awards ceremony was officiated by Grace Fu, Minister for Culture, Community and Youth,...

In the final phase of Performa 15, which ended on November 22, a couple of performances turned profitably to music, creating synergies with standardized hand gestures in one case and the dynamics of theater lighting in the other.Agathe Gothe-Snape’s Rhetorical Chorus took place at the New York Society for Ethical Culture, inside its...

Singaporean curator Qinyi Lim’s exhibition A Luxury We Cannot Afford begins by citing the attitude of Lee Kuan Yew towards art and culture: a frivolous waste of energy and resources better spent on industrialization and militarization. If this approach persisted until the creative industries were recognized as a cornerstone of...

Lawrence Weiner is a 73-year-old post-minimalist conceptual artist who turns language into art. Blenheim Palace is a 300 year-old, monumental, baroque country house widely considered the most lavish private home in England. Not the most obvious match.And yet! Weiner was invited by Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill, (brother to the 12th Duke of...

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